New Toyota Headquarters Features Natural Light for Comfort and Efficiency
You don’t become one of the world’s leading automakers without thinking big and towards the future. Toyota has been a world leader in their industry for over a decade and has relocated approximately 4,000 workers to a new North American Headquarters facility at Legacy West in Plano, Texas. Everything is bigger in Texas, and this might be one of the newest examples.
The company had committed over a billion dollars in constructing seven airy office buildings clad mainly in glass and arranged around a central plaza of open-air and glass-enclosed spaces that are designed to inspire transparency and interaction among workers. The initial and main design came from Dallas-based Corgan, Inc. architects with the implementation left to construction manager Austin Commercial for developer KDC.
Keeping with the persona of Texas, this building screams “big”. It took more than 2,000 daily workers to pour the cement to create enough concrete for the length of 477 AT&T Stadiums. The bottom portion of the campus was made using 1,200 tons of Texas limestone. The footprint spans 2.1 million square feet over 100 acres of real estate. Toyota moved from its North American headquarters in longtime home of Torrance, Calif. to Plano. The campus has enough room to accommodate 6,500 employees overall.
The buildings’ exteriors are made of glass meant to evoke transparency, while the large central plaza inspires discovery and creativity, which the company says will be a magnet for young professionals. The campus has enough glass to equate to nearly 50,000 2019 Tacoma truck windshields.
While they looked for local help on much of the project, when it came to the structural glass curtain walls the project management team at Harmon, Inc. knew they needed the best and that meant looking around the country. Due to their unique approach to custom projects and breadth of experience, W&W Glass was selected by Harmon, Inc. to handle the engineering and supply of the North and South main lobby entrances at the central campus building. The entrance walls transcend into a parapet handrail at the top, which was a very challenging detail to achieve seamlessly.
Working hand in hand with the Harmon team, the designers at W&W Glass selected clear insulating glass with a Pilkington ProT low-e coating for the walls. The handrail uses clear SentryGlas® laminated glass with both areas utilizing Pilkington Planar™ 905 fittings for support, lobby walls connected to clear monolithic tempered fins and handrailing at the terrace is connected to stainless steel stanchions. The glass exterior terrace of the building is protected by generous roof overhangs, which provides shade for the company’s workers.
Natural light also plays a big part of the overall concept of the project. It might not be the sunshine state, but Texas gets its fair share of sun. Enter Toyota’s Plano campus-wide solar power system. This installation is just one example of Toyota’s environmental efforts to achieve the goal of USGBC Platinum LEED Certification for the state-of-the-art campus. The approximately 7.75-megawatt system is the largest corporate office on-site solar installation among non-utility companies in the state of Texas. In total, the system is expected to provide approximately 25 percent of the power needed for the new headquarters campus. The system was completed in phases. Phase one covered two parking structures – approximately 2.45 megawatts per garage – and came online by August 2017. The final installation, located on a third parking structure, was installed in December 2017 produces about 2.83 megawatts. Other eco-friendly features include drought tolerant landscaping will use no fertilizers, no chemicals and no artificial irrigation.
For more information on all the projects completed and underway by the W&W Glass professionals, visit the project portfolio section of wwglass.com.
W&W Glass LLC is a family owned business with a 70-year history in the metal and glass industry, one of the largest metal and glass companies in the New York metropolitan area and the largest supplier of structural glass systems in the country. We have over two decades of experience in the design and installation of various building enclosure systems, including stick-built curtain walls, pre-glazed unitized curtain walls, Pilkington Planar™ structural glass facades, and custom metal and glass enclosure systems. We install all of our work with our own dedicated union labor force. W&W is consistently the largest employer of glaziers in the NY metropolitan area.
